Red Hook Revisited

Take One: Red Hook, pre-deluge. A tall, glowering man sits at the bar of Fort Defiance, an artisanal-cocktail joint. “Look at these ice cubes,” he says, studying his glass. “Aren’t they beautiful? They’re so big and square. Man, this is a good drink.” He urges his companion to take a sip. “Isn’t that bitchin’?”

The actor Michael Shannon—bug-eyed, restive—has lived in Red Hook for six years. He and his partner, the actress Kate Arrington, and their four-year-old daughter, Sylvia, share an apartment above Fairway. “It’s a quiet neighborhood, once you get past the industrial corridor,” Shannon said. He wore paint-splotched Converse sneakers and had a pencil behind his ear. “Sometimes it feels almost Southern. It reminds me of where I’m from.”

He grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and dropped out of high school to act. He’s often cast in creepy-neighbor roles: an escaped mental patient (“Bug”), a suburban schizophrenic (“Revolutionary Road”). It was his day off from the Broadway play “Grace,” in which Arrington co-stars. He reached for a jar: “You like pickled okra? This shit is awesome. Try it.”

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was Steve Buscemi, his cast-mate in “Boardwalk Empire,” in which Shannon plays a self-flagellating Prohibition agent.

“I lost my keys,” Buscemi said. “I just came to bum an extra set.” (His brother Michael also lives in Red Hook and is often at Fort Defiance.)

“Holy smokes!” Shannon said. “How’s Episode Twelve?”

“It’s good,” Buscemi said, before heading out to a waiting car.

“That is beyond random,” Shannon said, after Buscemi had left. “That was like Halley’s Comet.” He twirled a toothpick. “Hey,” he said to the waiter, “is there any bacon floating around back there?”

Shannon walked to Fairway, where he towered above most of the shoppers. “What happened to my chocolate-covered cayenne peppers?” he said. He bought a bag of chocolate-covered almonds and, on the way out, greeted a security guard named Tarik. “I’ve seen all his movies,” Tarik said.

Up at the apartment, Arrington was helping Sylvia make a collage. Shannon and Arrington met as actors in Chicago; “Grace” is their first play together. Arrington and Paul Rudd play married evangelicals, and Shannon is their creepy neighbor. “We kind of fall in love,” Arrington explained as Shannon wrestled with their cat, Pouce.

Shannon ended the Red Hook tour at Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies. “Grace” is his Broadway début, and he was still getting used to the bigger house. “On Broadway, you have to deliver something,” he said. “When there are a thousand people sitting there, you can’t just go out and say, ‘Hey, I’m me. Isn’t it great?’ ”

Take Two: mid-November. Two men stand outside Fairway, now empty and closed to the public.

“They still got you on the payroll?” Shannon said from outside the gate.

“Getting paid,” Tarik said. “Trying to open at the end of January. Everything is gutted.” He’d been watching over the parking lot, turning away grocery-seekers.

Shannon walked down Van Brunt Street, which was littered with bulging garbage bags and discarded drywall. The Sunday before Sandy hit, he and Arrington played a matinée of “Grace,” then took Sylvia to Arrington’s mother’s place, in Harlem. “There were nine of us there,” Shannon said. “Nine people and three cats, for almost a week.”

He arrived at Fort Defiance, where the water had risen knee-high and wrecked the basement. A bartender was wiping construction dust off highball glasses while a waitress crouched in the corner, sorting through crumpled cash. “She’s washing tip money from a month ago,” the bartender explained.

Shannon talked to the owner, St. John Frizell, who was planning a sidewalk pig roast. He was days away from reopening. “The first week, we got avalanches of volunteers,” Frizell said. “They would pitch in for a few hours, cleaning up the basement, ripping up Sheetrock.”

Walking toward the water, Shannon said, “For a while, it was hard to walk around and not get depressed. But now it seems like things are coming together.”

At the Key-lime-pie place, the manager explained that she’d lost all her inventory, as well as three weeks of business. “I had a whole ad campaign for Thanksgiving, and nothing happened,” she said.

Shannon walked back to his building, passing a large white tent. It wasn’t FEMA: a Russell Crowe movie was being shot on location. “This is so surreal,” Shannon said. He tried opening the electric gate, which had been on the fritz. “There used to be a hustle and bustle down here, with the grocery store and whatnot.” He frowned. “This gate, though—this gate’s always been a pain in the ass, even before the hurricane.” ♦